Rae grabbed her heavy jacket from the makeshift hook on the tent’s internal frame, wrestled open the door’s long metal zipper with icy fingers, and stepped out into the nonexistent tumult with the effort of an Arctic explorer entering a blizzard. Abandoning the revealing circle of light, Rae Newborn stumbled out into the darkness.
She tripped twice, nearly sent sprawling by unseen obstacles on the uneven ground, before she found the soft trunk of the fallen cedar that drew a line between her living quarters and the island’s forest. There she huddled, head down, fighting to wrap the feeble breathing and visualization exercises around the attack, waiting for the great body of the wave to break over her and retreat.
It did, eventually. The sensation of being a small candle in a gale slowly gave way to steadying reason, the blood ceased to rush so furiously through her veins, her vertigo ceased its whirling, and she did not faint. The groans in her throat stayed behind her teeth. After a time, Rae sat up, bone weary, and dashed both hands against her eyes. The urge to run blindly into the forest (or the sea, or traffic), to abandon the burden of rational thought for pure, mindless panic, was at times close to overwhelming, if for no other reason than the chance it offered for being knocked into blessed unconsciousness. It was to avoid the temptation of oblivion that she’d stopped driving. She well knew why the sensation of panic—demeaning, unpredictable, and completely pointless—was named after Pan, flute-playing tempter of the woods and meadows.
Still, when the attack passed, it was over until the next time, leaving the victim languid and relieved and ready for sleep. Like a recurrent fever, she thought; like some mirror image of sex. And with that, Alan was there at her side.
Rae grieved for Bella and she ached for Alan, every day. Losing them had left two gaping holes in her, one bearing the outline of Bella’s vigorous little body, the other Alan’s solid bulk, holes of whistling emptiness with the chill of utter vacuum. Bella’s joyous greeting “Mommy!” was so thoroughly a part of her that she heard it still, heard it with the same conviction that causes a woken sleeper to lie straining for the echo of the disturbance, knowing without question that the sound was real, not a dream. Mommy! with its nuances of excitement or alarm or sheer ecstasy would shoot through Rae’s hearing while she was reaching for a newspaper, pouring a cup of coffee, turning a page, dropping off to sleep.
And, of course, overhearing the actual cry of a living child to its mother shuddered through Rae like an electric shock.
With Alan, the loss was both more pervasive and less immediate. It came to her as the impulse to turn and tell him something, or the need to be held by his arms or buoyed by his infectious laughter, as the skin of the hand recalling his tight cap of curls and the coolness of his long, fine fingers. Every day for the last fifteen and a half months, the loss of those two people had continued to ambush her, knocking her to her knees with stark, ever-fresh disbelief, and although the sharpness and the duration of these ambushes was fading, that was, in its way, almost worse. Alan and Bella were no longer moving easily through her mind. Once, she could have conversations with Alan, play games with Bella, more or less at will (or with as much will as a mental patient can muster). Now when they appeared in her thoughts, they were oddly static, frozen in attitudes she had once loved; even their outlines were pale. She was losing them for good, and she did not know if she could bear it.
Another reason for the gun in her knapsack.
Two wary people, Rae Newborn and Alan Beauchamp, both long divorced when they met, both parents of grown children they felt they had failed, yet despite their wariness, the bond between them was instantaneous and permanent, a jolt of current that crackled between them when—of all clichés—their eyes met at a gallery opening for a painter friend of Rae’s. They left the gallery together. Four days later, Alan proposed, and they were inexorably embarked on The Conversation. Rae had been cold with apprehension, but she had no choice: Alan had to know what he was facing.
“Monopolar depression,” she told him. “Not bipolar—that’s manic depression. Mine is just the downs. Melancholia was the old name. Winston Churchill called it his Black Dog. It’s scary, Alan.”
“I can imagine.”
“I mean for the people around me. For me it’s like being suffocated and having to act like everything is fine. From the outside I begin to look like a zombie. Flat affect, they call it: food, sex, beauty, anger, life, work, everything goes dead. Inside, it’s pure agony, unrelieved, pins-and-needles grimness. Physical pain is nothing by comparison. It’s why so many depressives commit suicide, because the pain gets to be more than you can bear. I …” She cleared her throat, and forced it out. “I’ve tried to commit suicide twice.”
“Jesus, Rae. Isn’t there medication?” he’d asked helplessly. “Prozac, that sort of thing?”
“Sure. Some of it even does some good. But they all need a long time to take hold, weeks even, and when they do, I turn into a nice cheerful vegetable. Even relatively mild drugs like Prozac work in the brain by suppressing dopamine, which is linked to creativity. A whole side of me goes numb.”
“I see.” Rae had heard the brief phrase, and knew with a terrible conviction that what she was telling Alan was too much, that Alan wanted out of the conversation, out of the whole brief, magical, doomed relationship. She made herself go on calmly, although she wanted to rage and weep.
“But the worst part, for me and everyone around me, is the transitional times. I hallucinate. If you imagine depression like a part of the body going to sleep—your hand, say—I go through these times that are the equivalent of the tingling before and after the numbness sets in. It’s like my mind tingles. I hear snatches of voices, I glimpse movement that isn’t there, I smell things, my fingers imagine strange textures.”
“What …” Alan looked lost, casting around for the proper response. And being Alan, he retreated into ideas. Rae heard his strategy as a death knell. “I’m sorry, I don’t know much about the disease. What do they think causes it?”
“A mix of chemistry and life. The tendency is often inherited. Early life experiences affect it—losing a mother when you’re young is common among depressives. And growing up in an atmosphere where no one approves of anything you do, that doesn’t help. But basically, nobody knows.”
Alan had gone home not long after The Conversation. Rae heard the door close, reached for her glass, and drank herself into oblivion, absolutely certain she would not see him again. The next morning she forced herself out of bed, forced herself to eat and shower and behave as if she still had a life. She was sitting staring miserably at a slab of teak when his knock came on the door.
He had a piece of paper in his hand. He thrust it at her, and asked, “Is this what you mean?”
Confused, she took the paper and read what was written on it:
In the middle of life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood, where the straight way was lost…
… as one who has escaped, labored of breath, from the deep to shore, turns to those dangerous waters and looks back…
“What is this?” she asked him.
“Dante. The Divine Comedy. I thought it sounded like what you say you go through.”
A dark wood, where the straight way is lost.
“It sure does.”
“Well, if Dante can survive it, so can we. A folie à deux.” They were married two weeks later, and in the nine years and twelve days of their life as husband and wife, no argument persisted overnight, no parting went without a phone call, and neither of them was ever bored in bed. Even Rae’s pregnancy, discovered a scant three months after the wedding, took them quickly from shock through tentative acceptance and into a deep sense of their daughter as a gift, as precious as she was unexpected. Rae’s daughter Tamara might have been from another species to her mother; Alan’s son Rory was so incomprehensible to his father that the two saw each other perhaps once a year (and always in Los Angeles, on Rory’s ground); but with Bella, the fates got things right. Their f
amily was small, but complete unto itself.
And Rae still woke at night with her hand questing blindly along Alan’s side of the bed, still heard his voice murmuring in her ear, felt his fingertips brush her hair, though he and Bella had been cold, scattered ash for four hundred and seventy days.
While Rae sat hunched over on the soft-barked tree holding the hand of Alan’s memory, her eyes had adjusted to the dark. Not that much adjustment was required; the full moon was above the trees now, and the clouds had cleared away. She’d forgotten how bright moonlight was, away from the city; she could have read a newspaper by the stark light that bathed her clearing, she could have sewn a seam or worked a piece of inlay—assuming that her hands could remember how to hold the tools. The lowest branches of the trees near her tent were lit by the diffuse warm light of the lamp, but their upper reaches formed intricate black silhouettes against the pale sky.
The night was still, no breeze stirring the branches. Rae shifted on her perch, faintly uneasy. Somewhere across the water, far away on a neighboring island, a dog barked four or five times and then went quiet. A tiny bat flitted through the clearing. A raucous night bird screeched (making Rae twitch), the coals in the fire pit hushed into ash, and a chorus of tree frogs somewhere off in the woods behind her croaked out their availability. A pair of owls hooted at each other on high and low notes. Soothing noises, all of them.
So why was Rae’s heart thudding so?
And then the chorus of frogs cut off abruptly. Rae’s head came up fast to listen, but the faint, even susurration of water on rock, tiny wavelets pawing at her beach, was the loudest sound in all of creation.
Cold sweat broke out along her scalp, and the breath through her nostrils filled the night, heavy breaths that seemed to come from just in back of her shoulder, and in an instant hands would grab her from behind and the slow-motion nightmare would play all over again and the—
No! she broke in desperately. This is not fear. Fear has an object; fear makes sense. This is anxiety; anxiety means choking; it feeds on itself you know that; anxiety has no rhyme or reason. There is nothing to fear here, there’s no one behind me, there’s no reason to strangle on anxiety. Solitude is not only what I want, it is my natural state. Anxiety is beside the point; fear is—
The litany stopped as Rae’s loud breath froze in her throat. A sound had come to her over the night air, a slow, distant throb, rising and falling, too indistinct to be called a noise. Dear God, she thought hopelessly, is this some new kind of hallucination? Voices in the walls and the touch of imaginary hands are not enough, I now have to draw up the sound of distant drums in the jungle?
She caught the idea before it could feed further into her anxiety, and squelched it hard. This is a new country to you, she lectured herself. This could be an actual, true-to-life, audible-to-sane-ears noise. No—not could be; it was: Without a doubt, this sound would prove to be some odd natural characteristic of the San Juans. Mating calls of the whales, or a relative of those seasonal noises north of San Francisco that used to drive people nuts until they were identified as some kind of shrimp or mussel. Although it did, admittedly, resemble the haunting voices of months past, those endless nonexistent sounds bumping against her eardrums, even if there were no words in this sound, and no emotion.
Then a small branch cracked nearby, and Rae’s entire body jerked around to face her attacker. Her heart leapt like a wild thing trapped inside her chest as she waited, head raised and jaw slightly open, for a repeat of the noise; when it did not come, the very silence seemed to nestle up to her and pluck at her skin. Her throat choked shut at the looming sky and the towering treetops, the uncanny hugeness of the tent, the sheer massive size of all the world’s things. In a minute, she would be a cowering mouse beside a gargantuan Olmec head. In a minute, everything around her would take on the tingling wrongness of Picasso’s thick-limbed women thudding along the beach, that smothering expansion of everyday objects that since childhood had sent her cowering beneath folded arms.
There is nothing to fear here, she told herself; it’s a raccoon; it’s not going to attack me; everything is normal. She said it aloud: “There are no attackers here. There are no Watchers in the woods.”
Over and over she repeated the words, and she might have made it, might have convinced herself and gone nervously to bed, but before her pulse could return to normal, a third noise came, the sound she dreaded most in all the world, reaching out to plunge her into abject terror: a boisterous young male voice shouting over the roar of a motor. A boat, clearing the next island as a couple of her neighbors headed home, but all Rae heard was Young Male. Her nose was suddenly filled with the stench of young sweat, a ghostly hand insinuated itself through the front of her shirt, and thought fled; Rae broke and ran, straight into the arms of Pan.
Or, straight into one of the panic god’s trees. Agony jolted through her as a branch snapped back against the exquisitely sensitive scar tissue on the left side of her body. The pain rattled her from teeth to toes, and she folded up, to lie curled tightly around herself on the cold, damp, soft ground beneath the tree, hugging her pain until it died away and the sounds she made shifted from sharp, urgent gasps to moans, deep and despairing.
Oh, what was she doing here, what the hell was she doing here, when a couple of kids in a passing boat could send her off the edge by a shouted phrase? How could she possibly think she could do this? Just take the damn gun and put an end to it, Rae. Oh God, she groaned. Oh shit. Oh hell.
The thing about madness was, it just took so damn much energy, and it was so thoroughly tedious in the meantime.
Perhaps she would just lie here, in the nice, quiet shelter under the fragrant, drooping branches. She would lie still, hidden from sight, feeling the moss grow up over her, pulling itself up one gentle spiky tendril at a time, until it covered her like a blanket and turned her into a soft, green, passive, Rae-shaped mound. What a lovely idea.
The idea was lovely, but the ground was hard beneath the decaying leaves, and her middle-aged bones too stiff to put up with the position. Reluctantly, ruefully, she got to her feet and pushed her way out of the low branches, grateful to find that the only damage resulting from her flirtation with Pan were a lot of bruises and a bash on her face that had missed putting out her eye by inches. Shaken and aching, she picked her geriatric way over the uneven ground toward the calm and disinterested glow of the tent. She did not even pause to check that the male voices were gone.
She crawled into her sleeping bag and lay curled there, slowly warming and feeling, if not safe, then at least not actively under threat for the first time since she’d stepped off the Orca Queen. She studied the leisurely drift of the moonlight across her roof, and imperceptibly slipped away into sleep.
Dawn had not come yet when she woke, but it was not far away. The ceiling of the tent was a gray presence overhead, the TICK… TICK of the small travel alarm on its bedside crate the only fissure in the stillness. Her bleary gaze rested on the clock’s face, its luminous hands faintly visible in the growing light, and then she frowned and worked one hand out of the warm cocoon of her sleeping bag (wincing at the awakening aches) to bring the clock up to her face. Seven hours? She hadn’t slept a seven-hour stretch in years, even with drugs.
She put the clock down and drew her arm back inside, and lay in her snug sack while the tent’s furnishings slowly took shape around her. A dark blob indicated the kerosene lamp hanging from the ridgepole; a monolithic square represented the stack of plastic storage chests that functioned as a combination bedroom closet, toolshed, and pantry, with the smaller shapes beside it of her locked trunk, the big metal toolbox, and the wooden box that held her fine woodworking tools. The top of the desk seemed to float off the ground, the slats of her wooden chair becoming visible against it. Soon, she could make out the drape of her carpenter’s belt, slung from the back of the chair as if a gunslinger had dropped it there. The head of the hammer began to gleam dully; her bladder decided it was time to get
up.
The inside of the canvas was beaded with condensation, her boots were as cold and rigid as ice cubes, and she was very glad she had gone to bed more or less fully clothed. She worked a fleece pullover past the layers of polypropylene and cotton flannel she already wore and tugged the knit cap Petra had given her over her short hair. Her fingerless gloves were in the pockets of her heavy jacket, somewhat protected from the cold, and she put them on before reaching for her old friend the carpenter’s belt, solitary companion on this mad quest.
With all the clothes she wore, buckling the belt took some attention, and it rode nearly at her waistline instead of down around her hips. Still, the accustomed weight, the rattles and creaks of tools and leather, the pat of the hammer against the outside of her right thigh and the press of the three-quarter-inch tape measure against the small of her back all made her feel more herself than anything in the world.
The hammer at her right hip was one of the few things that connected the Rae who stood on the island with the Rae she had once been, thirty-two years before, when Rae had discovered in herself an unexpected taste for the physical act of building. A pregnant twenty-year-old, married to a man who hid his own manual incompetence behind a scornful derision of those he referred to as “rude mechanicals” (Shakespeare never having changed the oil in a car), and faced with a set of shelves that needed putting up, Rae had marched (or rather, by that point in her pregnancy, waddled) down the street to the hardware store and asked the salesman what she needed for the job. The cheap drill and screwdriver that she had bought that day had long since been given over to landfill, but a month later, looking at a slightly more ambitious project involving a piece of furniture in the baby’s room, and with a husband even more vocal about people who do-it-themselves instead of leaving it to the experts (all of whom seemed to be on long jobs or on vacation), Rae found herself defiantly buying the most expensive hammer in the shop.
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